Homonyms are words that have the same spelling and sound but different meanings. They differ from homographs, which have the same spelling but different pronunciations, and homophones, which have the same pronunciation but different spellings. Homonyms are easy to use because they have identical spellings and sounds.
Homonym can be seen as a subset of homographs. Homonym can also be considered a subset of homophones. While homograph means words that are spelled the same and homophone means words that sound the same, homonym means words that have both the same sound and the same spelling, but are different words. Let’s use a few examples to clarify the differences between a homonym and these other two similar concepts.
Homographs that are not homonyms include words like read which means the present tense of the verb “to read” and read which represents the past tense of the same verb. Since these two words, although spelled the same, are pronounced differently, they are homographs, but not homonyms.
Homophones that aren’t homonyms include words like peer, meaning “equal,” and wharf, meaning a place to dock a boat. Since these two words are pronounced identically but do not spell the same, they are homophones, but not homonyms.
And a third example of words that might look like homonyms but aren’t are words with multiple meanings: words with the same root, but with different incarnations as, perhaps, a noun and a verb. Since these are really just the same word used in different ways, they don’t meet the criteria for homonyms. But if we take the words peer which means “a person of equal standing” and peer which means “to watch carefully”, then we have two distinct words which both have the same spelling and the same sound, and this is an example of a homonym.
Homographs confuse people, because sometimes the same spelling has multiple pronunciations, and you need to figure out which meaning is being referred to before you know how to pronounce it. Homophones confuse people because the identical sound gives them a close identification in our minds, and if we don’t match the spelling with the meaning, we end up with typos. Homonyms have none of these problems: because they have identical spellings and sounds, unless there are other homophones with different sounds or homographs with different spellings, it’s really hard to go wrong with them.
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